Adam: "Well, Daddy's is nice, but yours is best. Your's is squishier."

Friday, March 4, 2011

Chill pill

This week has been

like a string of ugly pearls; one day after another

of crabby kids fighting with each other. As a kid, when we would act like that my mother would call us "nasty little pills". This week I have had a whole bottle-full.

.

One kid in particular has made the days really challenging, and by challenging, I mean somebody please suck my eyes out with a vacuum, pull out my brain with a pair of tongs and then stomp on it, because that would be more pleasant than the past three days have been. (I should open a spa.

I would call that the "Vac-Stomp Package").

.

Today when the rigamerole started up again, I was fabulous. I mean it. I deserve the "My brains are melting in my head, but on the outside I'm cool as a cucumber" award. And cucumbers are cooler than fourteen year old boys with swishy girl hair. I didn't flinch, I simply said, in a calm, quiet voice, "Go to your room." I repeated it like a Buddhist chant until the offending (and yes, offensive) party got sick of me and stormed off down the hall to test the slamability of his (or her) bedroom door.

Award time. Right here.

Later, after many attempts to get a certain girl-child to focus on a simple task, I jokingly told Guy that they all had the attention span of fruitflies.

"It seems like there should be some kind of pill

we could give them to help them stay focused." I laughed.

"They actually have a pill to prevent them from happening at all,

but we chose not to take those." He smiled.

So we all took a chill pill in the form of our (da-da-dun!!!) First Ever Family Bike Ride. Thanks to Ellen (Thanks, Ellen!), who gave us some awesome used bikes, and another thanks to a borrowed trailer from Kathy (Thanks, Kathy!), we toodled off to take Ellie to her play date. And here, the definition of toodle is "to ride very, very slowly, stop a billion times and begin to feel a strange burning feeling in the tops of one's thighs". Parts of me that have squeezed babies out of them were whimpering (Whose fine idea was it that we should straddle the insole of a toddler's shoe for a seat? If anyone in the midwest is reading,

I am in the market for a good used tractor seat).

Poor little Ellie had never been on a long bike ride before.

She was ready to poop-out those last few blocks,

and Guy dropped back to encourage her.

Then above the clackety sound of her training wheels, I heard her little voice call out, "I can...do it! I can...do it!" Her voice rose and continued her chant, a word or two for each pump of the pedals, all the way to Kaylee's house. It was inspiring.